This book is the culmination of a decade's worth of oral history and archival research, an ethnographic historical study of the formation and partial destruction of queer Latina and Latino community life in San Francisco for about four decades. Informed by LGBT historical scholarship and queer studies, oral history theory and methodology, and Latina and Latino scholarship on gender, sexuality, and community life, Memories of Desire documents and analyses a community of LGBT Latinas and Latinos heretofore unrecognized, a history undocumented in LGBT and Latino archives, and rarely remembered as part of either Latino or LGBT history. By examining both community and neighborhood in the public manifestations of queer Latino desires, the book traces the lives and memories of sixty narrators as they worked to build what Latino scholars have referred to as cultural citizenship, but also informed by writing on sexual citizenship and the body. Bridging oral history, LGBT history, and Latino history, the book additionally looks at how the sexuality of migration-through the lives of queer border crossers-and informs what is assumed to be a national heterosexual U.S. history of the largest growing racial ethnic 'minority' in the country.
As such it is a book about San Francisco, but also from San Francisco about California, the U.S., Latinas and Latinos, and queer migrations into the nation.